Quotes by Christopher Lasch

A society that has made nostalgia a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

– Christopher Lasch

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product.

– Christopher Lasch

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times - the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie - seem attractive by comparison.

– Christopher Lasch

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

– Christopher Lasch

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

– Christopher Lasch

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

– Christopher Lasch

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

– Christopher Lasch

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.

– Christopher Lasch

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

– Christopher Lasch

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.

– Christopher Lasch

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

– Christopher Lasch

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.

– Christopher Lasch

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.

– Christopher Lasch

The left ask people to believe that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.

– Christopher Lasch

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

– Christopher Lasch

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

– Christopher Lasch

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.

– Christopher Lasch

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

– Christopher Lasch

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

– Christopher Lasch

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.